Can increasing local cooperation improve outreach to inactive youth?

03/06/2022

Workshops for employment counsellors and local experts may strengthen motivation and provide inspiration on how to reach out to inactive youth.

Youth unemployment is a problem in all EU countries, and many studies have shown that those who are persistently unable to find work early in their careers have poorer employment prospects and lower wages later on. The EU's Youth Guarantee (YG) Programme was launched to help tackle this problem - but it can only be truly effective if it reaches and motivates the young people most in need.

Cooperating with local experts may be a useful tool supporting Public Employment Services (PES) in their efforts to reach inactive (and disadvantaged) youth.

This was the main focus of an online conference organised by the Budapest Institute on 2 June 2022, to inform PES counsellors and managers of the results of an experimental pilot implemented in 2020. The pilot involved organising interactive workshops in 30 districts across Hungary, where PES counsellors and local stakeholders discussed the diversity of inactive youth and developed strategies for reaching them. As the pandemic disrupted the implementation of the workshops and especially the ensuing activities of PES, the causal impact of the workshops could not be verified. However, the qualitative information collected in follow-up questionnaires suggested that the workshops were effective in raising awareness about the importance of outreach and in creating and strengthening cooperation between local stakeholders. It seems worthwhile to conduct further pilots to test how such workshops may be mainstreamed into the regular operations of the PES.

At the conference, Márton Csillag and Ágota Scharle, senior researchers at BI, presented the design and results of the pilot programme, and also invited some of the trainers who had organised the district workshops to share their experiences. The closing presentation by Judit Temesszentandrási of the EU Commission, summarised the new guidelines on designing the strenghtened Youth Guarantee Programme.

The pilot as well as the conference was organised in the framework of the Youth Employment PartnerSHIP (YEP) project. Further details are available at our website.